Anti-War

Smedley Butler is generally left out of U.S. history. If you bring up a guy who prevented a Wall Street coup against FDR, you do real damage to the tale of peaceful respect for government from the beginning of time up through January 6, 2021. If you mention the scandal that erupted when he recounted how Mussolini had run over a little girl with his car, it’s hard to leave out the U.S. government’s friendly relations with Mussolini.

Interestingly, it was Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, who had been in the car with Mussolini and who had told his friend Smedley Butler about it, who later recounted in his autobiography a second Wall Street coup plot that he said he had exposed to Eleanor Roosevelt and thereby her husband, and successfully put a stop to. For some reason we never celebrate Vanderbilt as the savior of the U.S. government in the way that those of us who’ve heard of him do Smedley Butler, even though Vanderbilt turned against oligarchs as Butler turned against warmakers.

Hidden in plain sight, the extreme hypocrisy of the U.S. position on NATO and Ukraine cries out for journalistic coverage and open debate in the USA’s major media outlets. But those outlets, with rare exceptions, have gone into virtually Orwellian mode, only allowing elaboration on the theme of America good, Russia bad.

Aiding and abetting a potentially catastrophic -- and I do mean catastrophic -- confrontation between the world’s two nuclear superpowers are lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Like the media they echo and vice versa, members of Congress, including highly touted progressives, can scarcely manage more than vague comments that they want diplomacy rather than war.

The drama currently unfolding in which the Biden Administration is doing everything it can to provoke a war with Russia over Ukraine is possibly the most frightening foreign policy misadventure since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1967 Lyndon Johnson attempt to sink the USS Liberty and blame it on Egypt, either of which could have gone nuclear. I can well recall the Robert Heinlein sci-fi book The Puppet Masters, later made into a movie, which described how alien-slugs, arriving by way of a flying saucer landing in Iowa, invaded the earth and parasitically attached themselves to the central nervous systems of humans and became able to completely control their minds. What the humans know, they know. What the slugs want, no matter what, the human will do. And the tale gets really scary in geopolitical terms when some Secret Service Agents are “occupied” by the invaders and they are thereby poised to capture the President of the United States. I would point out that the movie came out when Bill Clinton was president, which should have provoked some concerns about whether it was fact or fiction.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada — This morning, Toronto supporters of the Wet’suwet’en land defense struggle against the Coastal Gaslink pipeline set up construction sites at the Toronto homes of TC Energy Board Chair Siim Vanaselja and Royal Bank of Canada Executive Doug Guzman. The supporters also flyered the neighborhood with photos of the two men with signs warning, “Your neighbour is pushing the Coastal Gaslink pipeline through Wet’suwet’en Territory at gunpoint.”

Rachel Small, Canada Organizer for World BEYOND War, said, “Today supporters took action to bring the message home to Siim Vanaselja and Doug Guzman, two men leading companies that are orchestrating, funding, and profiting off of the violent colonial invasion of unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. The decisions they make are directly linked to the militarized violence that the RCMP has carried out on Wet’suwet’en people over the past several months to shove through the Coastal Gaslink pipeline at gunpoint.”

Someone asked me the other day for advice on collecting the best essays of the past 20 years. I recommended the new collection of Glen Ford’s called The Black Agenda. I recommend it to everyone — including people who are not black. I’m not black.

Glen Ford was my friend and an ally in the struggles for peace and justice. He was a leader and a brilliant and an always reliable speaker, writer, and organizer on anti-racism, anti-oligarchy, anti-poverty, and anti-war work. He was a key part of efforts to impeach George W. Bush (whose record we should all read Glen’s book to be reminded of it seems).

This book is worthwhile just for the preface by Margaret Kimberley and the autobiographical introduction by Glen. I’ve considered Glen central to U.S. activism since about 2000, which seems a long time to me, yet his incredible saga, recounted in his introduction, actually breaks off just about when I met him. The essays, however, are from the past 20 years

Love thy enemy? I get a chance to do so on a regular basis, thanks to the email (or nasty-mail) I sometimes get in response to my column, e.g.:

“Must be a dearth of anyone with anything intelligent to say for the News to put your drivel out for us to chew on. Not going to go over ridiculous points you made . . .  not worth my time. Next time offer a cure. Otherwise it’s just reportage that we already know.”

I have an advantage here. When I get a communique like this, I know the writer read my column in a regular newspaper, not a progressive site on the Internet — and that’s a good thing for multiple reasons. One: The mainstream media is often fearful of a viewpoint like mine, which is critical of war and nukes and nationalism and border cages and such, so I always feel delight on learning I’ve made it into mainstream print. Two: Hearing from someone who hates what I’ve written is the essence of across-the-aisle communication. So what if the letter hits me like a verbal bullet? The writer exposed himself to a counter-viewpoint, expanding his awareness of the world. Let me do the same.

Propaganda is most impactful when people don’t think it’s propaganda, and most decisive when it’s censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived. The actual impact is on thousands of movies made, and thousands of others never made. And television shows of every variety. The military guests and celebrations of the U.S. military on game shows and cooking shows are no more spontaneous or civilian in origin than the ceremonies glorifying members of the U.S. military at professional sports games — ceremonies that have been paid for and choreographed by U.S. tax dollars and the U.S. military. The “entertainment” content carefully shaped by the “entertainment” offices of the Pentagon and the CIA doesn’t just insidiously prepare people to react differently to news about war and peace in the world. To a huge extent it substitutes a different reality for people who learn very little actual news about the world at all.

Former President Barack Obama recently tweeted that the day of a school shooting was the worst day of his presidency. Well, it certainly shouldn’t have been a good day, but, seriously, what the filibuster? Was it a bad day because children were killed and he didn’t order their killing?

It’s bad enough having a drone murder program, but do we also have to go along with the pretense that it doesn’t exist, or the pretense that it’s been stopped? Until this week, the U.S. government was hiding this data for much of 2020 and 2021 on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, leading some to imagine that drone strikes had stopped. Now that the data is available, we see a decrease but still massive bombings.

World BEYOND War, December 15, 2021

Whether or not you’re familiar (as everyone should be) with Peter Ackerman’s book and film “A Force More Powerful” about successful nonviolent activism campaigns, or his other books and films on the same theme, if you have any interest in changing the world for the better you’ll probably want to check out his short new book, The Checklist to End Tyranny. A webinar on this book would have accomplished radically more than the recent Joe Biden Democracy Summit.

The book does not address the criticism that powerful nonviolent tactics have been used to undesirable ends by the U.S. government, coopting local movements for desired overthrows. Nor does it apologize for its dubious origins in the Atlantic Council. But, obviously enough, getting hung up on this shortcoming reveals primarily the lack of seriousness in those getting hung up. A powerful tool is a powerful tool, no matter who uses it for what good or evil or unclear purposes. And nonviolent activism is the most powerful array of tools we’ve got. So, let’s use these tools for the best possible purposes!

Ya gotta love how the U.S. media annually freaks out about a “war on Christmas” by which it means something completely unrelated to any wars, while the U.S. military always has several actual wars going on Christmas, the same as every other day. Perhaps especially on Christmas, as George Washington’s slaughter of drunk and sleeping British soldiers on Christmas 1776 has been rendered so “special” that it’s claimed as the very first in a string of millions of glorious “special forces” actions, and the wars now generally consist of oh-so-special actions.